The invention relates to a multimedia system receptive for mass data presentation thereto, said data comprising an application program inclusive of a multiplatform interpreter, said system furthermore having a platform subsystem, arranged for interaction with said multiplatform interpreter, comprising processing means for executing said multiplatform interpreter driven by said application program and under control of user input means, and furthermore having user output means controllable by said multiplatform interpreter. The mass data may be physically present on a self-contained mass memory, such as an optical disc. Alternatively, it may be presented via a, remote interconnection or channel in a dialog structure. Multimedia means that the subsystem may receive, process and output more than one category of signal, such categories being for example: alphanumerical text, graphics, speech, music, and possibly other. The subject of the application program, or application for short, may be various as well, such as a video game, an instructive or informative item such as an encyclopedia, a shell for a personalized filing system, or other. Various such platforms have been commercialized, such as CD-I machines and personal computers. Regarding CD-I standards and Compact Disc standards in general, reference is had to the article xe2x80x98Compact Disc Standardsxe2x80x99 by Jan Korst and Verus Pronk, ACM/Springer Multmedia Systems, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 157-171 (1994), which article is a review of various earlier published specifications of such standards.
The application program is conventionally being called a title, and various such titles have been provided by the manufacturers of the-subsysiem hardware or by others, in such a way that the titles may be played on a particular type or brand of subsystem, but not on another: they are thus platform-specific. A need has been felt to allow such application programs a potentially larger customer base, in that they would be playable on various different types of platform.
Accordingly, amongst other things, it is an object of the present invention to make the application program less platform specific, in that an appreciable part of its stored information would have harmonized data formats and be interpretable on various different platform subsystems. The inventors have found it feasible to make programs interpretable on different platforms, in particular, by defining formats for multimedia data that can be played by most platforms, although under certain circumstances it may require some real-time conversion by the delivery platform. Furthermore, even if the bulk of the multimedia data is present in the title only once, it may prove advantageous to have some of the data in platform specific formats. An additional object of the invention is the decoupling of creation platform and playback platforms. Now, according to one of its aspects, the invention is characterized in that said application program is based on a predetermined instruction set that is interpreted by said processing means for said executing, whereby said platform subsystem is an instance of a prespecified abstract machine having said predetermined instruction set, a predetermined data type set, and furthermore comprising resource facilities according to quantitative minimum requirements. In particular, multiplatform multimedia title creation is intended for platform-independent multimedia titles. In the above, an instance is the actual representative or realization of its species; each instance has the minimum facilities of the species, but various instances may differ appreciably.
The invention also relates to a self-contained mass memory comprising a multiplatform interpreter, for use with a system, and comprising:
a dispatch table (A) comprising location addresses of platform dependent primitives,
a kernel area (B) containing all locations addressable by said location addresses for storing executable and interpretable code, and
an extended kernel area (C+D), having a first area (C) containing code that is both platform independent and title independent and a second area (D) containing title dependent code.
This arrangement of elements has proven to be straightforward, easily accessible, and little prone to definition errors.
The invention also relates to a platform subsystem arranged for interaction with such mass data comprising such title and having load means for loading said multiplatform interpreter. Various further advantageous aspects are recited in dependent claims.